...not afraid of snakes...

Friday, February 08, 2008

The Whore of Bibiolon

This is my first book, and I am rather proud of it, despite its obvious shortcomings... For whatever one makes of its curious binding, it conceals the contents of my heart, as clearly as if I had cut it open with a scalpel for the anatomists to read.

I love Victorian pastiche. I'm sure you must have noticed that by now. The publication of a new historical novel set in the nineteenth century is almost guaranteed to spark my interest; if it promises 'a startling vision of Victorian London, juxtaposing its filth and poverty with its affluence, and 'a daring young heroine' then so much the better. I first spotted The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling in the Guardian Review and, after some initial qualms, popped myself in the library queue for it. I was afraid that it would prove derivative - the central conceit has something of Sarah Waters about it and the characters whiff a little of The Crimson Petal and the White - but, 450 pages later, I emerged pleasantly surprised. Belinda Starling is a fearlessly dirty novelist, who writes with panache and is confidently unimpressed by classic taboos about pornography, sex and genitalia. Not that this necessarily qualifies her as a successful historical novelist, since being controversial isn't the same as being good and being good isn't the same as being controversial, but certainly it marks her out as a cut above. Like Sarah Waters, she writes warmly and naturally about our Victorian past at the same time as challenging its patina of respectability. Arguably, Dora Damage does for heterosexuals what Tipping the Velvet did for lesbians: it looks directly at the dildo in the room.

Dora Damage, our first person narrator, is a lower-middle class housewife living in Lambeth, married to a respectable small-time bookbinder, Peter, and mother to an epileptic daughter, the five year old Lucinda. She spends her days battling with dirt and bugs in her poky home, toiling with the ' familiar quiet anger, that this was my life, these were the walls of my existence, and the confines of my hopes.' She recognises that she is not very good at domesticity - that, in other words, she 'does not wear the halo of the angel in the house' - and mourns the loss of her intellectual independence through marriage. Peter is not a violent husband, but he is hardly a kind or pleasant one either. He keeps Dora at arms length, using her as a skivvy and workmate while denying her affection or physical contact of any kind. They haven't had sex in several years, and their previous encounters have involved little pleasure and a good scrubbing with carbolic soap.

As the novel opens it is 1860 and Peter is suffering from an advanced form of rheumatism that hampers his ability to work; unbeknown to Dora he has incurred large, unpayable debts with a loan shark called Mr Blade in order to cover their basic expense. When it becomes clear that they will be unable to pay their rent or feed their daughter, and that Peter can no longer staff the workshop, Dora rises to the occasion and takes it upon herself to keep Damages' afloat through her own labours. She will teach herself how to finish books and tool titles, while Peter's old apprentice, Jack, will do the manual work of forwarding and binding. She approaches a Holywell-Street bookseller, the disreputable and Dickensian Mr Diprose, for work and through him is introduced to Sir Jocelyn Knightley. With a perverse glee at her femininity, the men contract her to bind a series of novels and tracts for the Les Sauvages Nobles, a group of highly placed connoisseurs of pornography. Initially her commissions are rather mild - 'Turkish' romances, Bocaccio's Decameran and the more risque of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - but, as the months go by, they become more offensive and frightening. There are albums of abusive photographs of children; and stories of masters killing and then post-humously raping their slaves; and of slaves raping their mistresses so hard that they rip them apart. She is increasingly aware of the strange nature of her product, an impersonal, titillating luxury that satisfies something sexual, but without offering anything in the way of love or comfort:

Oh, but it was revolting... Revolting, yet deeply sad; poignantly paradoxical, that such literature described the most intimate thing we could do with another person (or admittedly, people), in the least human terms. There were no people in these books, really; only parts. The stories weren't about union with another at all; there were about individual fantasies, self-serving indulgences. They weren't generous or free-spirited or embracing; they sought to exclude, to diminish and dominate. There was no pleasure, unless it was denied to some as much as it was enjoyed by others.

Her situation is also one of growing incredulity. How, she asks herself, could she be transformed so quickly from a bored housewife to a facilitator of sordid, violent fantasies for rich men? Finally pushed too far by a certain photographic catalogue, she decides to give up the business for good, only to discover that she cannot break free of her noble patrons so easily and that the contract she has signed with them values her life at nothing.

From the beginning, Dora's is a delicious voice. Speaking in retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight - her narrative is written from some future point - she is witty and matter-of-fact, without any of the assumed humility that so often marrs the first person of female Victorian characters. (As I intimated before, she is more than a little like Sugar from Faber's Crimson Petal.) Clearly she has an agenda; a bee in her bonnet about the lot of women like her. Her story is full of snark, and spirited cheek:

Madness is a female word. 'It's a madness' they say, like it's a governess, or a seamstress, or a murderess. There's no male equivalent, no such word as 'madner'. I should start saying it, but then they might lock me up.

Occasionally, she strays into outright feminist dialectic, provoked by the unfairness of the division of labour and the wildly variant worth attached to 'man's work' and to a woman's:

I whisk up egg white and water to make bookbinder's glair, and I am an alchemist; I whisk up the remnant egg yokes to make omelettes, sauces, custards, and I am a curmudgeon. Finishing is the way a book presents itself to the world and gets noticed; the forwarding is more like women's work, for one never notices it unless it has been shoddily done.

There is a bitterness to her that underlies everything, and she speaks often about her vulnerability as a working woman. She understands that by putting on her husband's apron she has lost her respectability and conceded the moral high ground; in the eyes of her neighbours and of the world at large, she has exposed herself to irreprable social 'danger'. She must buy leather in order to bind, and that means visiting tanner's yards, where the roughest and lowest of men work half naked; in order to sell her books she must walk the streets of London alone and barter prices in shops; in order to feed her daughter and pay her husbands debts she must visit the pawn shop and queue with gin-soaked louts for pennies in return for her (ultra respectable) mourning veil. Week after week she is forced to break the rules that have bound her to the social world, and dispatch the standards of her marital home. Worst of all in the eyes of her family, she neglects her housework in order to finish the paid work.

As she makes money from her endeavours, and even employs a second man, a former slave, to help her in the shop, she realises that her neighbours (and the men whose books she binds) consider her little better than a prostitute. How else should such a woman, who disdains her husband's protection and the veil of modesty to make do for herself, be categorised? At the height of her success, when she is empowering herself and providing for her loved ones with the efforts of her own two hands, her status is consistently undermined by the supposed limitations of her sex.

For the most part this descent into inequity is well-wrought, but at times Starling's thematic thrust against it is so anguished as to be overtly polemical:

Author your own body. Walk your own text. Is it not constantly being read anyway, each time you walk up the street?

The author's consciousness of women's place in history is fretful, angry, frustrated and speaks out in distractingly contemporary language. The idea of 'authoring' the body is typical of second-wave feminisism, and has little or nothing to do with the first stirrings of women's rights in the middle and late nineteenth century. At times it seems as though Starling's purpose is to reach down the throat of the past and rip out its nasty misogynistic heart. Her passion to refigure and rewrite the male-female power balance becomes positively murderous as the novel nears its close.

There is some weakness in this, I think and it is worth mentioning that The Journal of Dora Damage is rather unkind to white, heterosexual men. Not even one is redeemable, or shows a modicum of humanity, throughout the whole 450 pages. Blaggards, weaklings and perverts, the lot of them. Normativity is an unacceptable vice, which is shame and a loss to the novel. Still, what it does well, it does very well indeed. It successfully recreates the damp and fog of London's heartlands and shows all the signs of excellent foundational research, even if it wears it rather too heavily at times. 'And if that wasn't quaint enough, you still serve your food a la russe; don't you know the rest of the world is now dining a la francaise?' one character exclaims to Dora in a moment positively begging to be footnoted to Judith Flander's The Victorian House.

The arc of Dora's sexual awakening at the hands of the texts she binds is tautly developed, as is the battle she fights between her carnal urges and her repressed emotions. As she develops a language for lust and for sex, and then finds a lover she share it with, she taps into the deepest resevoir of her strength:

...I learnt that it is not just the men who like to look, as I sat myself up on my elbows or twisted myself around, the better to observe my lover's attentions. But I learnt too that men have the better view... And he would place a candle between my thighs, and gaze and gaze and smile, and I learnt at last what my best angle was.

Aside from the discomfort I might feel at the idea of anyone putting a candle so near there, I find this one of the most moving passages I've ever read about a woman's incipient sexuality. And it is all brought together into a discourse about the difference between love and sex, and the lust for power, that does Starling credit. She still feels the need to hammer home her meaning with strident commentary now and again:

Yes, you may love him, I wanted to say, but you love him as you loved that spear, with Din holding it, as a victim loves a villain. And he, he loves you like that too, only in reverse. He loves you as the British Empire loves its conquests, and look what happens when they react, revolt, retreat... Look at the Fenians; look at the Sepoys. That's how much he loves you.

But, all in all, I consider this an acceptable vice, the kind of brash and forceful lack-of-confidence that would surely have disappeared in Starling's future novels. All new writers have a tendency to over-egg the thematic pudding. Sadly, we know already that there won't be any more. Just weeks after completing the manuscript for Dora Damage, Belinda Starling died of septic shock following a routine operation at the tragically young age of thirty-four. It makes my opening quotation, which forms the opening line of the novel, dreadfully poignant - The Journal of Dora Damage was Starling's first, and last, book, and she had every reason to be proud of it. I recommend it to anyone with an eye for things Victorian and I look forward to seeing it on the Orange Prize longlist in April.

Comments

The Whore of Bibiolon

This is my first book, and I am rather proud of it, despite its obvious shortcomings... For whatever one makes of its curious binding, it conceals the contents of my heart, as clearly as if I had cut it open with a scalpel for the anatomists to read.

I love Victorian pastiche. I'm sure you must have noticed that by now. The publication of a new historical novel set in the nineteenth century is almost guaranteed to spark my interest; if it promises 'a startling vision of Victorian London, juxtaposing its filth and poverty with its affluence, and 'a daring young heroine' then so much the better. I first spotted The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling in the Guardian Review and, after some initial qualms, popped myself in the library queue for it. I was afraid that it would prove derivative - the central conceit has something of Sarah Waters about it and the characters whiff a little of The Crimson Petal and the White - but, 450 pages later, I emerged pleasantly surprised. Belinda Starling is a fearlessly dirty novelist, who writes with panache and is confidently unimpressed by classic taboos about pornography, sex and genitalia. Not that this necessarily qualifies her as a successful historical novelist, since being controversial isn't the same as being good and being good isn't the same as being controversial, but certainly it marks her out as a cut above. Like Sarah Waters, she writes warmly and naturally about our Victorian past at the same time as challenging its patina of respectability. Arguably, Dora Damage does for heterosexuals what Tipping the Velvet did for lesbians: it looks directly at the dildo in the room.

Dora Damage, our first person narrator, is a lower-middle class housewife living in Lambeth, married to a respectable small-time bookbinder, Peter, and mother to an epileptic daughter, the five year old Lucinda. She spends her days battling with dirt and bugs in her poky home, toiling with the ' familiar quiet anger, that this was my life, these were the walls of my existence, and the confines of my hopes.' She recognises that she is not very good at domesticity - that, in other words, she 'does not wear the halo of the angel in the house' - and mourns the loss of her intellectual independence through marriage. Peter is not a violent husband, but he is hardly a kind or pleasant one either. He keeps Dora at arms length, using her as a skivvy and workmate while denying her affection or physical contact of any kind. They haven't had sex in several years, and their previous encounters have involved little pleasure and a good scrubbing with carbolic soap.

As the novel opens it is 1860 and Peter is suffering from an advanced form of rheumatism that hampers his ability to work; unbeknown to Dora he has incurred large, unpayable debts with a loan shark called Mr Blade in order to cover their basic expense. When it becomes clear that they will be unable to pay their rent or feed their daughter, and that Peter can no longer staff the workshop, Dora rises to the occasion and takes it upon herself to keep Damages' afloat through her own labours. She will teach herself how to finish books and tool titles, while Peter's old apprentice, Jack, will do the manual work of forwarding and binding. She approaches a Holywell-Street bookseller, the disreputable and Dickensian Mr Diprose, for work and through him is introduced to Sir Jocelyn Knightley. With a perverse glee at her femininity, the men contract her to bind a series of novels and tracts for the Les Sauvages Nobles, a group of highly placed connoisseurs of pornography. Initially her commissions are rather mild - 'Turkish' romances, Bocaccio's Decameran and the more risque of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - but, as the months go by, they become more offensive and frightening. There are albums of abusive photographs of children; and stories of masters killing and then post-humously raping their slaves; and of slaves raping their mistresses so hard that they rip them apart. She is increasingly aware of the strange nature of her product, an impersonal, titillating luxury that satisfies something sexual, but without offering anything in the way of love or comfort:

Oh, but it was revolting... Revolting, yet deeply sad; poignantly paradoxical, that such literature described the most intimate thing we could do with another person (or admittedly, people), in the least human terms. There were no people in these books, really; only parts. The stories weren't about union with another at all; there were about individual fantasies, self-serving indulgences. They weren't generous or free-spirited or embracing; they sought to exclude, to diminish and dominate. There was no pleasure, unless it was denied to some as much as it was enjoyed by others.

Her situation is also one of growing incredulity. How, she asks herself, could she be transformed so quickly from a bored housewife to a facilitator of sordid, violent fantasies for rich men? Finally pushed too far by a certain photographic catalogue, she decides to give up the business for good, only to discover that she cannot break free of her noble patrons so easily and that the contract she has signed with them values her life at nothing.

From the beginning, Dora's is a delicious voice. Speaking in retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight - her narrative is written from some future point - she is witty and matter-of-fact, without any of the assumed humility that so often marrs the first person of female Victorian characters. (As I intimated before, she is more than a little like Sugar from Faber's Crimson Petal.) Clearly she has an agenda; a bee in her bonnet about the lot of women like her. Her story is full of snark, and spirited cheek:

Madness is a female word. 'It's a madness' they say, like it's a governess, or a seamstress, or a murderess. There's no male equivalent, no such word as 'madner'. I should start saying it, but then they might lock me up.

Occasionally, she strays into outright feminist dialectic, provoked by the unfairness of the division of labour and the wildly variant worth attached to 'man's work' and to a woman's:

I whisk up egg white and water to make bookbinder's glair, and I am an alchemist; I whisk up the remnant egg yokes to make omelettes, sauces, custards, and I am a curmudgeon. Finishing is the way a book presents itself to the world and gets noticed; the forwarding is more like women's work, for one never notices it unless it has been shoddily done.

There is a bitterness to her that underlies everything, and she speaks often about her vulnerability as a working woman. She understands that by putting on her husband's apron she has lost her respectability and conceded the moral high ground; in the eyes of her neighbours and of the world at large, she has exposed herself to irreprable social 'danger'. She must buy leather in order to bind, and that means visiting tanner's yards, where the roughest and lowest of men work half naked; in order to sell her books she must walk the streets of London alone and barter prices in shops; in order to feed her daughter and pay her husbands debts she must visit the pawn shop and queue with gin-soaked louts for pennies in return for her (ultra respectable) mourning veil. Week after week she is forced to break the rules that have bound her to the social world, and dispatch the standards of her marital home. Worst of all in the eyes of her family, she neglects her housework in order to finish the paid work.

As she makes money from her endeavours, and even employs a second man, a former slave, to help her in the shop, she realises that her neighbours (and the men whose books she binds) consider her little better than a prostitute. How else should such a woman, who disdains her husband's protection and the veil of modesty to make do for herself, be categorised? At the height of her success, when she is empowering herself and providing for her loved ones with the efforts of her own two hands, her status is consistently undermined by the supposed limitations of her sex.

For the most part this descent into inequity is well-wrought, but at times Starling's thematic thrust against it is so anguished as to be overtly polemical:

Author your own body. Walk your own text. Is it not constantly being read anyway, each time you walk up the street?

The author's consciousness of women's place in history is fretful, angry, frustrated and speaks out in distractingly contemporary language. The idea of 'authoring' the body is typical of second-wave feminisism, and has little or nothing to do with the first stirrings of women's rights in the middle and late nineteenth century. At times it seems as though Starling's purpose is to reach down the throat of the past and rip out its nasty misogynistic heart. Her passion to refigure and rewrite the male-female power balance becomes positively murderous as the novel nears its close.

There is some weakness in this, I think and it is worth mentioning that The Journal of Dora Damage is rather unkind to white, heterosexual men. Not even one is redeemable, or shows a modicum of humanity, throughout the whole 450 pages. Blaggards, weaklings and perverts, the lot of them. Normativity is an unacceptable vice, which is shame and a loss to the novel. Still, what it does well, it does very well indeed. It successfully recreates the damp and fog of London's heartlands and shows all the signs of excellent foundational research, even if it wears it rather too heavily at times. 'And if that wasn't quaint enough, you still serve your food a la russe; don't you know the rest of the world is now dining a la francaise?' one character exclaims to Dora in a moment positively begging to be footnoted to Judith Flander's The Victorian House.

The arc of Dora's sexual awakening at the hands of the texts she binds is tautly developed, as is the battle she fights between her carnal urges and her repressed emotions. As she develops a language for lust and for sex, and then finds a lover she share it with, she taps into the deepest resevoir of her strength:

...I learnt that it is not just the men who like to look, as I sat myself up on my elbows or twisted myself around, the better to observe my lover's attentions. But I learnt too that men have the better view... And he would place a candle between my thighs, and gaze and gaze and smile, and I learnt at last what my best angle was.

Aside from the discomfort I might feel at the idea of anyone putting a candle so near there, I find this one of the most moving passages I've ever read about a woman's incipient sexuality. And it is all brought together into a discourse about the difference between love and sex, and the lust for power, that does Starling credit. She still feels the need to hammer home her meaning with strident commentary now and again:

Yes, you may love him, I wanted to say, but you love him as you loved that spear, with Din holding it, as a victim loves a villain. And he, he loves you like that too, only in reverse. He loves you as the British Empire loves its conquests, and look what happens when they react, revolt, retreat... Look at the Fenians; look at the Sepoys. That's how much he loves you.

But, all in all, I consider this an acceptable vice, the kind of brash and forceful lack-of-confidence that would surely have disappeared in Starling's future novels. All new writers have a tendency to over-egg the thematic pudding. Sadly, we know already that there won't be any more. Just weeks after completing the manuscript for Dora Damage, Belinda Starling died of septic shock following a routine operation at the tragically young age of thirty-four. It makes my opening quotation, which forms the opening line of the novel, dreadfully poignant - The Journal of Dora Damage was Starling's first, and last, book, and she had every reason to be proud of it. I recommend it to anyone with an eye for things Victorian and I look forward to seeing it on the Orange Prize longlist in April.